Housing beyond the Shelter

While individuals and families living in homelessness have many needs that

must be met, the most critical are housing and shelter.

Housing has a pervasive impact on nearly all aspects of a person’s life. If

housing is adequate, it affords both physical and emotional privacy; offers

opportunities to create a positive sense of self and empowerment; and provides

stability and security. Housing can be either permanent or transitional. When

residents reach the time limits built into transitional housing, they are expected to

"graduate" to more independent, "normal" housing settings. Thus transitional

housing is a stage in a progression, while permanent housing entails no

assumptions about personal growth and development. An additional factor that

sometimes distinguishes transitional from permanent housing is tenancy rights. For

transitional residents, tenure is usually contingent on participation in services and

compliance with program rules, whereas permanent tenants usually hold leases

and have full tenancy rights.

Emergency shelter programs provide short-term housing on a first-come,

first-served basis where clients must leave in the morning and have no

guaranteed bed for the next night. Some emergency shelters may provide beds

for a specified period of time, regardless of whether or not clients leave the

building. Emergency shelters are intended to remove individuals from the

imminent danger of being on the street. Although emergency shelter services are

critical to meeting the immediate needs of homeless people, they do not provide

people with permanent housing (Cunningham, 2009), which is the primary goal.

Security of Tenure

In a number of regions and contexts where humanitarian shelter programs

are implemented, the use of and access to land and housing by individuals and

communities – including persons affected by displacement – is of a different

character and subject to a different type of governance than in the Global North

context of formal ownership evidenced by written documents and official

records.

Despite this operational reality, until recently, both donors and shelter

agencies have largely adhered to traditional notions of providing shelter solutions

based on individual property ownership, given the view that this was the only

sufficiently secure form of tenure. As a result, people lacking individual ownership

– often among the most vulnerable – were excluded from shelter solutions.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS ON SECURITY OF TENURE

HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS

 Security of tenure is one of the most important aspects of the human right

to adequate housing. Housing rights fall within the category of economic and

social human rights, as opposed to those of a civil and political nature. Social and

economic rights are often conceived of as ‘positive’, in the sense that their

fulfilment requires government authorities to affirmatively undertake measures in

favour of individuals. By contrast, civil and political rights are often described as

‘negative’ in the sense that they focus on actions that government authorities

must refrain from taking. An example of this difference in practice involves

comparing the right to adequate housing with a right it is frequently associated

with, the right to property. The right to adequate housing is primarily positive. For

it involves steps the authorities should take to assist individuals in accessing

housing and improving its adequacy. The classic right to property is negative in

the sense of requiring authorities to avoid interfering with property rights – unless

doing so is necessary to an important public purpose.

The right to adequate housing is protected as a component of the broader

right to an adequate standard of living in Article 11 (1) of the International

Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

The Covenant’s provisions are not only broadly accepted but have also

been clarified through the issuance of numerous authoritative interpretations by

the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UN CESCR). CESCR
has issued two relating to the right to housing. In 1991 the first defined the right in

broad terms as “the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity”.

It set out seven essential factors by which the ‘adequacy’ of housing in any

given situation could be judged. Six of them – availability of services; affordability;

habitability; accessibility; location and cultural adequacy – relate to the nature

of the housing itself. The seventh, however, relates security of tenure to the legal

relationship between the housing and its occupants. Legal security of tenure is

defined as guaranteeing “legal protection against forced eviction, harassment

and other threats.” As with the other ICESCR-protected social and economic

rights, the right to adequate housing is meant to be implemented “progressively”

by states “to the maximum of [their] available resources”. The progressive

approach to the fulfilment of positive rights contrasts with the immediate

obligation on states to ‘respect’ negative rights – by refraining from violating them

through their own actions – as well as to ‘protect’ their exercise by taking

reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable violations by non-state actors. This

difference is further highlighted by the fact that states are explicitly required to

provide effective legal remedies – usually through access to proceedings before

an impartial adjudicator – when civil and political rights are violated. By contrast,

no explicit right to a remedy exists with regard to social and economic rights,

fuelling a persistent debate about whether they were, by their very nature, averse

to being ‘justiciable’ capable of being decided by a court of law.

References:

1. HHS Office, A. (2015, November 05). Homelessness. Retrieved from

https://www.hhs.gov/programs/social-services/homelessness/index.html
2. HUD USER. (1999, December). Retrieved from
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/homeless/homelessness/co
ntents.html
3. Cunningham, Mary. (2009). Retrieved from
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411837_ending_homelessness.pdf

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.

4. Rosenheck R. (2000). Retrieved from

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=174363
American Journal of Psychiatry
5. From Shelter to Housing: Security of Tenure and Integration in Protracted
Displacement Settings. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.nrc.no/resources/reports/from-shelter-to-housing-security-of-
tenure-and-integration-in-protracted-displacement-settings/